IBM M1115 - not available even with B5/B6 taped

[reddy157]

Hello everybody as that's my very first post here, even though I read other post for a while.

I'm building a simple NAS on ASRock J4105B-ITX with IBM M1115 plugged into it. Unfortunately plugging it as-is causes that the motherboard doesn't boot. I tried it on some old machines I have access to: Fujitsu ESPRIMO C710 and some home-made PC on old ITX motherboard I don't even know the name. Fujitsu beeps several times and reboots in a loop, the other also does similarly, just without that beeping IIRC. I've already learnt that that's typical and I should tape pins B5 and B6, so I carefully done that with a small stripe of an isolating tape. But with those pins taped, none of the motherboards recognizes the card. They boot nicely, but the card is not visible anywhere. I checked BIOS/UEFI, I checked with lspci run on live Ubuntu 20.04.1. I also tried with sas2flash.efi -listall on ASRock under UEFI Shell started from an USB drive, which says that no LSI cards have been found.
I bought the card second-hand online. The seller claimed it's working, showing screens from Windows device manager as a proof, but one can't trust that, for sure. Maybe he has already tried flashing it to the IT mode and failed?

Is the card dead? If so - why does it block booting when pins are not taped? What else can I check?

Finally, a lame question - ASRock J4105B-ITX has 1 PCIe 2.0 x16 slot but only @2. Is IBM M1115, which is PCI Express 2.0 x8 , compatible with this slot? Even if so, will it handle with full (or at least decent) speed 5 x Seagate IronWolf 4TB attached to it?

 

[Jason Antes]

It may be an issue with the UEFI. Are you able to switch to BIOS only/Legacy or set the card/slot to Legacy?

As far as slot compatibility, yes it should be compatible but it will not be as fast; however there are some catches. Both the slot and the card have to negotiate properly. It should set at the highest connection rate that both support in common. However, some motherboards don't properly support this or only allow graphics cards in certain slots. You'll have to look at the MB documentation to know for sure as well as looking at the documentation for the SAS card to see what connections it will support as its lowest rate.

In short, you have 2 issues to investigate. I would start with the slot compatibility before mucking around in the UEFI settings.

 

[reddy157]

Thanks a lot for the reply! It's a bit more clear now to me.
Unfortunately I doubt it's the UEFI in this case. As I wrote above, I tried also on Fujitsu ESPRIMO C710 and some other motherboard with Core 2 Duo processor with no sign of life from the card. It didn't even get warm.
Today I got my hands on old HP ProLiant DL120 G6 server hoping that it will show up there. I tried both unmodified and with B5/B6 pins taped, still no luck. I booted it into DOS with an USB drive and checked with MegaRec.exe and sas2flsh.exe: both reported no SAS adapters found.
I had no much time today so I checked only one PCI slot in that server. I'll try with the other soon, but I'm starting to get accustomed to the thought that the card is actually dead.

The guy I bought the card from claimed it worked on IBM X3650 M3 and probably also on DELL Vostro 260, so it should not be somehow locked to a particular OEM. I'm running out of ideas what could I still check.

 

[Jason Antes]

I'd say it's likely dead.

 

[reddy157]

Thanks for all the hints. Apparently must be dead. The seller was kind enough to send me a replacement Dell H200 instead, I'm waiting for arrival.
Interesting though that without pins B5/B6 taped it hanged the Fujitsu PC like it was somehow trying to boot...

 

[Jason Antes]

It may have been alive enough to still have signal on those pins it interrupt the boot process but with them taped off then nothing to do so. Just a guess. Good luck with the new one.

 

[reddy157]

I got a replacement Dell H200 and it worked out-of-the-box, even without any taping the pins, on all the motherboards I've checked previously. I also managed to flash it to the IT mode without any issues. Too bad, but indeed that IBM M1115 must have been dead. Thanks Jason for your help!